Insignia with Direct TV

We received an Insigni HDTV 26" tv for Christmas. We have Direct TV - but not high def Direct TV. We don't want to pay for it as its not important to us.

We easily set up the new tv with the Direct TV box. However the picture just isn't that good. If we choose "Auto Zoom" for the picture mode, its okay. But the Auto Zoom makes us loose a good 5" of the screen on all four sides. The 26" tv itself is a bit smaller than the tv we did have.

Any suggestions? When we put the tv into "Normal" picture mode the faces are a bit fuzzy. Unless they don't move.

Our old tv is pretty old, but had a great picture. Again, High Def isn't important to us. But I hate to have had my father spend the money on us for something that is a worse picutre than what we had before. I am hoping that we are overlooking something or not doing something correctly and can enjoy a great picture with our regular Direct TV and our new tv.

Re: Insignia with Direct TV

You can try better cables but I am going to bet you are still not going to get the picture you are looking for. You have discovered the downside to the new hi def lcd or plasma tvs. They have to display the picture in their native resolution which is giong to be either 720P or 1080P depending on the tv you got. The signal you are sending to your tv is 480i, so what this means is your tv has to upconvert the signal from 480i to your tvs native resolution. Which will almost double the resolution or more. Plus stretch it to fit the widescreen.

How your picture looks will depend on how well your tv does at upconverting and how good the original program looked to begin with. Some tvs have great upconverters, others not so much. Your old tv looked better because it was actually displaying 480 lines of resolution and was made for that signal. Not to mention direct veiw tvs plain old look better. Plasma and LCD tvs where NOT a step up in performance in my opinion. They got popular because they are light, skinny and asthetically look "cool". In my opinion a cood CRT display has always performed better than plasma and lcd.

Like I said in another post, its much like the MP3 craze. MP3 actaully has less audio quality than CDs and DVD's. However since they hold a bunch of music and are very small they became more popular. The general public chose the "cool factor" over sound quality. Same problem with vhs and cassette tapes. vinyl records on a good turntable actually sounded better than cassette tapes. And Beta or 8mm video was better than vhs, and laser disk blew them all away. The best technology is not always the one that takes off unfortunately.

I will say though that newer plasma and lcd tvs are way better than what was out 5 to 10 years ago. For your needs you probably would have been better off getting a standard defintion flat screen. Unfortunately they are near impossible to find these days.

Out of curiousity how does this tv look with dvds? They should look pretty good, as well as some of the stations on your dish receiver. Some of the channels are dvd quality signals, others like some network stations like nbc and the likes might not look that great in some cases.